ipad apps

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about using Little Story Maker to create your own short books on your iPad. After publishing that post a bunch of people asked me to review Book Creator too. Book Creator is not a free app ($4.99 as an individual and less with volume purchasing) but I think that it is well worth the money that I spent on it.

Book Creator allows anyone to create their own books using images, text, videos, and audio recordings. You can arrange your book in three different formats; portrait, square, or landscape. Each page in your book can include pictures and videos from your iPad’s camera roll and or from your iTunes library. In addition to the pictures and videos you can include as much as text as you can fit on each page. In fact, if you just want to have text on a page you can do that. If you would like to narrate your book you can tap the record button to add your voice to each page of your book. Every page in your book can have a custom color scheme.

Your completed Book Creator projects can be sent directly to your iBooks library or shared to a service like Box or Dropbox where they will be available as ePub publications.

Book Creator could be a fantastic tool for students to use to create short stories or to create longer research papers that include multimedia elements. Watch the video below to see how Book Creator was used in a Chinese class.

Scrollshow is a neat presentation creation app for iPad. The idea behind Scrollshow is to present your slides as a continuous stream on top of a panoramic background. Unlike a typical slide presentation tool in which each slide is a separate entity, in Scrollshow the slides are integrated into the flow of a panoramic background. It kind of reminds of me Prezi. Learn more about Scrollshow in the video below.

Creating a Scrollshow presentation is similar to other slideshow creation apps. To get started select a theme and background. When you build your slides you’re really building frames within your background image. You’ll notice that the frame at the top of the editor moves with every new element that you add to your presentation. The frame is there to give you an idea of where each of your presentation elements will appear in the panorama.

Scrollshow is a free app. For students of middle school age and higher it could be a good alternative to Keynote.

Subtext is a great free iPad app that provides a place for teachers and students to have digital book discussions.

These are some of the many things that you can do with Subtext: using Subtext you can read ebooks, annotate ebooks, create quizzes about ebooks, and write blog posts about the ebooks you read. You can create private and public book discussion groups and build bookshelves for your groups.

To add books to your Subtext bookshelves you can pull from Google Books (many free ebooks are available that way), buy ebooks from Subtext (volume pricing is available), or upload your own titles (Greg Kulowiec has posted directions here). To annotate a section of a book just highlight it then choose what you want to do with it. The text that you highlight can be annotated with your messages, you can assign a quiz question to that text, or label that section as a literary element like “personification” or “foreshadowing.”

Most of us are familiar with the story of the Three Little Pigs. Three Little Piggies is an interactive iPad version of the famous fairy tale. Three Little Piggies offers three ways to enjoy the story. You can have it read to you in auto-play mode, you can read it at your own pace, or you can read along with the narrator (your choice of male or female voice). In the read along mode each word is highlighted as it is read by the narrator.

The best part of Three Little Piggies is the interactive elements built into the story. Shake your iPad and the piggies move. You can also touch the piggies to make them move. But the most fun element is the option to blow into the microphone to play the role of the wolf blowing down a house.

Three Little Piggies is currently a free app, but it’s labeled as “free for a limited time” so grab it while it’s still free.

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TinyTap is a free iPad app that allows you to create simple games based on pictures that you take. The purpose of the games you build is to help young students (pre-K through grade 4) practice identifying objects and patterns.

To create a game on TinyTap you upload pictures or take new pictures and arrange them into a set. Then select each image to create questions about it. To create your question press the record button and start talking. When you have finished talking select a portion of your picture to serve as the answer. I created a small game about objects in my house. I took four pictures of things in my house. Each question asked players to identify the objects in my house. For example, when a player sees a picture of my kitchen he or she has to identify the tea pot by touching it.

If you don’t have time to create your own games or you just want to see what others have done, you can browse the TinyTap Market. In the Market you can find a mix of free and paid games. A few of the free games that your students can play include “Dress for Winter,” “Match It,” and “Who Is Bigger?”